Democratic candidates are raking in donations this election season for all kinds of reasons, but one source of funding is deeply concerning. The people who staff America's leading medical societies are overwhelmingly backing Democratic politicians, party committees, and political action committees. Regardless of which party prevails on Election Day, Americans should be very worried about the politicization of health care in this country.
We have reviewed federal election records to document political donations from staff at 10 of the nation's leading medical societies. The list includes the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, and more. Only one organization – the Pediatric Endocrine Society – had no recorded donations. But at the other nine, donations overwhelmingly favored liberal candidates.
All told, we found that over 70% of medical society staff who donated money this election cycle backed Democrats or other leftist candidates, party committees, and PACs. By contrast, less than 2% of medical society staff donated to conservatives. Even more telling, nearly 78% of total donations from medical society staff went to Democrats and the left. Republicans and others on the right got only 0.24%.
If anything, our findings probably understate the level of medical society bias for Democrats, because we excluded donors with ambiguous affiliations. For instance, if someone recorded their employer as AMA, we didn't include them in our analysis. They could work for any number of organizations with that acronym, not just the American Medical Association. Regardless, our findings show a strikingly close connection between medical society staff and leftist politicians, which we believe bodes poorly for American patients.
Take the American Medical Association, where staff made well over 300 donations to the left. The AMA is a stalwart backer of DEI, with all its divisive policies that are anathema to the historic ethos of the healing profession. DEI has been used to dole out caregiving on the basis of race and identity rather than individual medical need, while medical school admissions put skin color above merit. This isn't medicine. It's activism, and the AMA staff is supporting the same activism in politics.
Ditto the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, where 95% of staff donations skewed left. It, too, broadly supports DEI on the grounds of "equitable access to mental health resources." The academy is also firmly committed to child gender transitions, recommending that all children have access to invasive and irreversible medical procedures. Forget evidence-based medicine – this is radical political activism, plain and simple.
These medical societies have broadly opposed the Trump administration's efforts to drive ideology out of medicine. They have also stubbornly refused to back away from ideology by so much as an inch. Over the summer, our organization sent a letter to these same 10 organizations, asking them to support a ban on the most extreme transgender procedures: genital surgeries on children. None so much as responded, much less agreed. The Trump administration is now asking many of these same societies to state their positions on sex-rejecting procedures for minors and whether they'll revise them, yet it seems unlikely they'll budge.
Americans are free to support whichever politicians and parties they want, but the evidence shows that medical societies have become little more than lobbying arms of the left. Yet that's not why these organizations are supposed to exist. The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and every other medical society was created to promote the highest standards of medical training and practice. In other words, they're supposed to protect the interests of physicians and patients alike.
Instead, these medical societies are staffed with partisans promoting a narrow agenda. Federal election records are the latest proof. Every American should be worried, because the loudest and most powerful voices in medicine are as determined as ever to put our people's health at risk.
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